Bronze Character Head after Messerschmidt (2 of 3)

Every muscle in this bronze character head is under strain: the brows are dragged down into a deep V, the eyes narrowed to slits and the lips pressed into one tight line. The cheeks bunch into thick mounds, and the chin stands out as a hard knob below the mouth.

From 1770 until his death, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) worked on this series. It ran to sixty-nine heads, of which forty-nine survive; he made them in alabaster and in a tin-lead alloy, called them simply Kopfstücke, and left the descriptive titles to others after his death.

Below the face the neck is long, its tendons standing out like cords above clearly modelled collarbones. The front of the skull is bald, while a fringe of cropped hair is chased in fine hatching round the back and sides. Each new bust is cast from its own wax and patinated by hand, near-black with silvery grey on the high points of brow and cheek.

Sixty centimetres high on a footprint of 21 by 21 cm, it fits a deep windowsill in a study, where side light picks out the cords of the neck. It is the second of three heads after Messerschmidt, the one in which the strain runs down from the knotted brow into the throat.

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